Hey, so I saw the tutorial... er, somewhere... about how to change the options on the language bar so you can type in other languages, and I've got the Greek Poly and the Greek Latin keyboard setups added, and they work fine- only I can't seem to figure out what the dead key is for my keyboard. I'm using an EeePC and I think that might mean that my dead key isn't one of the usuals- I can get an accent grave just fine, but for macrons and the like neither Ctrl or Alt seem to work.

The tutorial didn't make it terribly clear which of the three keys should be pressed simultaneously, and which in sequence, or at least I remember being confused. But still, I tried several combinations and none work. Anybody have any ideas? Thanks!

When I have my keyboard set to Greek Latin in the language bar, and I press ` followed by an a, I get: à (not in this window, but in Openoffice). Same thing happens if I press left-Alt at the same time as the tilde.

When I press Shift and ~ followed by an a, I get: ã.

When I press right-Alt and a at the same time, I get: á And I get several other characters when I use right-alt, but nothing with macrons. Some of the letters don't seem to have options for that, where would I go to mess around with keyboard shortcuts for my international setups?

On Macs you have the Keyboard Viewer and the Character Palette floating windows with which you can scan all your possible options. I forget what's the equivalent on the PC. [*] In Word you have the "Symbol..." option in the Insert menu.

I didn't respond at first because it seemed like you were going after Greek macrons at first.

If you are just going after Latin Macrons in either Windows or MacOS (( ĀĒĪŌŪ āēīōū -sorry, no "y"s)), then do as Adrianus said and shift your keyboard to Maori, and then use the tilde plus the vowel (upper or lower case). This works in MS Word, Note Pad, Word Pad and these forums, but not in everything. Make sure that when you change applications that you check your Language Bar. It will tend to put you back into English when going to different applications.

I didn't make it clear, Quin Firefrorefiddle, that the Character Map in Windows (Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Character Map) indicates the available keyboard shortcuts (less nicely than on the Mac, though, in my opinion).

On the Mac too, you can switch keyboard to Maori and back (if you don't use the Maori one everyday) but it's faster to use the Character Palette since I use also the grave, acute and circumflex typically.

The USA extended keyboard support more accent marks than one know exist! opt+a makes the macron, and then you just type the letter, and voila you’ve got a macroned letter. A lot more diacritical marks are available, just play around with the option-key and try them out :3.

Hey everybody, thank you for the help. I had been using the character map- but with international keyboard options, I didn't see much point in memorizing the Unicode numbers for each macron and copy-pasting was getting annoying. I will try the Maori keyboard- I'm not sure what the point of the Greek Latin one is, in that case, but I'll probably just delete it from my options. I do think that having a netbook (and therefore, for example, no option key) makes this harder, but I'm sure I'll figure it out.

I made a new keyboard with Ukelele today and then discovered that all the accented characters we need for Latin (with acute, grave, circumflex or caret, macron, breve) are ALREADY in the USExtended keyboard layout on the Mac! The Ukelele tutorial uses USExtended in a tutorial!I'm posting this and suddenly I read your note from yesterday, Hampie. That's incredible. I can't believe I've missed that for so long. Brilliant. And on PC! Ah, good old US of A! The pen not the sword, bytes before bombs!